A message of peace, hope

-Students deliver paper cranes to hospital in memory of a girl from Hiroshima.

-Students deliver paper cranes to hospital in memory of a girl from Hiroshima.

May 29, 2008|GENE STOWE Tribune Correspondent

SOUTH BEND Fourth-graders in the Harrison Primary Center's English language learners class were moved to share when they heard the story "Sadako Sasaki and the Thousand Cranes" in January. "I was sad," recalled Olga Costilla. The story tells of a girl who was 2 when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, where she lived. She developed leukemia, known as the "bomb disease," when she was 11 and heard the Japanese legend that anyone who folds a thousand origami cranes would get his or her wish. Sadako was still folding cranes when she died at age 12. In some versions of the story, other children completed the task of making the cranes. Her wish, at least in some versions, was not for healing but for peace. A statue of her stands in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park with the inscription: "This is our cry, This is our prayer, Peace in the world." Some schoolchildren still send folded cranes to be placed at the monument. Jane Kroll, who teaches the Harrison class with Amanda Russell, learned the story when a friend's daughter was diagnosed at 13, and the teachers decided to share it with the class. "It's a story I had never read before and wanted to read to them," Russell said. "They said they were interested in doing it." They decided to send their cranes to Memorial Hospital. For months, the 18 students worked on the origami. The day before the delivery, they had reached 973. By the deadline, they had 1,033 and kept some for the classroom. Dennis Flores, Rubi Gomez and Olga Costilla had produced the most, with Rubi accounting for nearly one-third of the total. "I love paper, and I love doing that sort of stuff," said Rubi, who has some cranes decorating her room. "When the teacher tried to tell me how to do them, I liked to do them." She can finish the 14 folds, starting with a square, in about a minute. The three delivered boxes of cranes, strung in various lengths on string, to the hospital, figuring that they could touch others suffering from sickness like Sadako. "We have some boys and girls that have leukemia here sometimes," Tracy Byler, Memorial Hospital's child life coordinator, told them. "It's hard to be sick like that." As the children lifted the strands of brightly colored birds -- green, purple, red yellow, white, blue, black, orange, multihued -- from the boxes, Byler was thinking of places to hang them, such as a bare corridor, and times to use them, such as memorial services with families of children who have died. "Since there's 1,000, we're thinking we can do quite a few things with them," she said.